All-purpose news and politics thread: Two Steps Beyond!

[Jackmando7]

There are those who do nothing but watch Fox News and listen to conservative talk radio. They grew up (or grew old) on programming like that, and yeah it's like growing up in a cult. Reminds me a news article I read recently about a North Korean Woman who was drafted by teh North Koren Government back in the 80's to be trained as a terroist in order to carry a bomb on to a South Korean plane. She did, the plane blew up, she was captured and they woudl have sentanced her to death but instead they gave her a tour of Seoul, showed her the truth and it was a serious rude awakening.

Short of shutting down Fox News, Breitbart and related conservative sources I doubt there will be any rude awakenings.

I guess a better question is the message of division and hate reaching more people than it did 10 years ago, or why is it reaching more people than the message of unity and love?

[Dalak]

10 years ago Obama was in the white house. Why would he be saying this stuff? I really am curious about that one.

What I don't understand is why one group became completely brain washed and turned into mob of hate, and the other group didn't. I don't read fox news or listen to talk radio, so maybe they are painting a much worse picture than that of the Huffington Post.

Obama wasn't in office until 2k9.

I can't get on political sites from work, but if you google "Huffpost white people" there are several articles calling white people out. I don't get why these stories are not influencing people the same way the stories on Fox News apparently are.

If those sorts of stories were the vast majority of what HP posted while they were constantly hyping the fact that they were the only ones you could trust then I could see the point you are trying to make.

E:

I guess a better question is the message of division and hate reaching more people than it did 10 years ago, or why is it reaching more people than the message of unity and love?

Some people are scared of losing what they have and are having those fears stoked daily by many right-wing news sources.

[Mister Mets]

The article is titled: Not Just Boy and Girl, More Teens Identify as Transgender. In my opinion, a declaration like that without any context seems pretty sensational. Furthermore, in the article the journalist undermines the data in the study herself, which makes the title seem a bit disingenuous.

Data gained from self reporting is inherently suspect. Even more so from teenagers who notoriously have issues with sex and identity. The study only chose to report data from ninth and eleventh graders, which makes me wonder why no data from tenth and twelfth graders? I'm suspecting cherry picking of data to support a preconceived idea. There wasn't a mention of the study being peer reviewed either.
That's really enough for me to discount this as BS.

The declaration in the title of the piece was accurate, although it's a fair point that self-reporting can result in bias. It could be that trans youth would be more likely to respond to a poll, or that teenagers aren't mature enough to make these determinations about sex and identity.

But the ignorant and bigoted arguments challenging it are exactly the same because racism and homo/trans-phobia are very similar in their structure, especially as espoused by (often straight white male) conservatives.

The arguments against interracial marriage -- even interracial dating -- were always about how "white women" were being corrupted by non-white (especially black) men, as if the women had no agency in these relationships and were simply acting that way due to how acceptable "race-mixing" was becoming in the modern era.

The same arguments are often made against LGBT individuals and relationships, claiming that somehow people are being "turned gay" by society at large -- when in reality, it's none of your damn business what other people choose to do with their lives so long as they aren't hurting others... especially if they are choosing to do something that they feel will make them happy.

Your "question" regarding transexuality is not much different -- the only reason anyone would even bring something like this up is if they had a problem with it: whether that's you or the people you are quoting is irrelevant in that respect, as trying to "intellectualize" it doesn't make it any less offensive.

Transferring an argument to a new context doesn't always work. Otherwise, we would deal with transexuality the same way we would with anorexia.

There are plenty of reasons to consider the question, especially when it comes to making health care and public policy decisions.

You spread a long debunked myth about sexual minorities in a disgusting "oh shucks, a guy can ask" way. A myth that is the basis of decades of oppression against queer people and is usually only kept alive by evangelicals and the alt-right.
Do the words "gay agenda" ring a bell?

Considering that this message board considers itself a bit of a "safe space" since the reboot, I would consider that reasons for a time out. Feel free to give yourself one of those.

As adults (or teenagers who agree to abide by the rules of decorum of this forum) we should be able to discuss sensitive topics. The gay agenda argument isn't defeated by pretending that the claim doesn't exist, but by pointing out how it is wrong. When topics become taboo, one of the results is that one side lacks all exposure to counterpoints and nuance.

[JBatmanFan05]

Lol, oh Nancy

A source told CNN that Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer worked on the spending deal for weeks -- and didn't include any other House Democrats in negotiations -- and then she turned around and rejected it.

https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/07/polit...own/index.html

[BeastieRunner]

You also have the majority in America will not be white people in most people's lifetime RIGHT now. If you're in your mid to lower 60s or younger, you're going to be seeing the change.

The projected changeover will be noticeable in about 19 years and Caucasians will be a major minority in about 26 years. Even with Trump's proposed immigration plan delaying the inevitable, you're looking at a conservative estimate of Caucasian whites being a major minority in 30 years time.

I think that scares a lot of his base more than anything.

[Mister Mets]

I guess a better question is the message of division and hate reaching more people than it did 10 years ago, or why is it reaching more people than the message of unity and love?

A lot of it comes down to political environment.

In 2008, voters in the middle were tired of Republicans in charge.
In 2016, voters in the middle were tired of Democrats in charge (I understand that HRC won the popular vote, but a small percentage of the population would've voted differently if Trump hadn't bragged about grabbing women by the pussy, or if the news on Hillary's flawed faith adviser had come out in October 2016.)

A complicating factor would be the backlash against excesses of the left, which contributes to a Republican mood (just as the excesses of the right contributed to a Democratic mood from 2006-2008). In a few years, we went from support of gay marriage being a taboo topic no Democratic presidential candidate would advocate for to being something that can be enforced by law. The rollout of the ACA was flawed. America's leading public intellectual argued in favor of reparations. A socialist got 43 percent of Democratic presidential primary voters. Life expectancy is declining in rural America.

Oh, I think the ones who voted for him know exactly what they were doing when they did so -- it's the people who may not have voted for him, but then try to (honestly) argue that Trump isn't a "real racist" that I'm referring to with that statement.

You know, the kind of people who argue that he was elected because people are tired of "political correctness" and/or due to "economic anxiety" instead of just openly admitting that he primarily was elected based on the underlying racist/white supremacist sentiment that is still far too common in this country.

How would we determine that racist/ white supremacist sentiment is more important than anything else?

https://www.salon.com/2018/02/06/how...-our-politics/

You can try about 'geographic sorting' as the 'real reason' for GOP dominance at the district level, but it's always been BS. The current 'more votes for Dems = more seats for Republicans' is a product of a deliberate strategy.

The political science on the topic does suggest geographic sorting counts for the majority of the difference. It doesn't mean there's no gerrymandering.

Actually, you don't.

You are deciding it is "Fact" because it is what you want to believe.

That's a fair point. This is an interpretation of someone's motives based on a story about what might be going on behind the scenes. That's a few steps removed from facts.

It's funny. I no longer care about re-litigating what happened in the 2016 election...but the only question that really still bugs me is, how a New York billionaire trust fund elite was able to convincingly paint himself to a particular group as the savior of the blue color worker. I mean, I know a lot of lies were involved, and dog whistles and all that...but for real. The dude is such an obvious sham.

But again, that whole Jim Jones thing, I guess. But with less fake socialism.

Trump convinced blue collar workers that he liked them.

Hillary Clinton and the establishment Republicans weren't able to pull that off.

honestly, looking at the populace now....yes

I think once Trump became the nominee, he was sure to win

youve got school children shouting racial slurs at kids in schools on the daily

their parents shouting at fast food workers, telling them to go back to their country

they were just looking for an excuse to let their ugly out, and Orange Foolius gave it to them

it wasn't economic anxiety, or coal

it was pure unadulterated racism and xenophobia

He won by less than a percent in key swing states. It was hardly an inevitable outcome.

[Mister Mets]

I saw an interesting comment online.


Fact-check: True.

http://time.com/5110606/chuck-schume...pod-challenge/
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/...icle-1.1155442

[Carabas]

I can't get on political sites from work, but if you google "Huffpost white people" there are several articles calling white people out. I don't get why these stories are not influencing people the same way the stories on Fox News apparently are.

So, for a lark I actually googled that, and there's actually nothing of the kind on the first two pages (didn't look at page 3 and beyond).

[Jackmando7]

So, for a lark I actually googled that, and there's actually nothing of the kind on the first two pages (didn't look at page 3 and beyond).

What's for a lark mean?

Really? I see one about most people on food stamps are white. I see another that says white people are responsible for race relations and they are responsible to fix it. I see several calling out white privilege. I mean, these don't paint white people in a very positive light yet minorities aren't out there giving hell to white people the way white people are doing it to minorities. Right?

[Kevinroc]

Russians penetrated U.S. voter systems, says top U.S. official

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/ele...op-u-s-n845721

The U.S. official in charge of protecting American elections from hacking says the Russians successfully penetrated the voter registration rolls of several U.S. states prior to the 2016 presidential election.

In an exclusive interview with NBC News, Jeanette Manfra, the head of cybersecurity at the Department of Homeland Security, said she couldn't talk about classified information publicly, but in 2016, "We saw a targeting of 21 states and an exceptionally small number of them were actually successfully penetrated."

[Gray Lensman]

This is what I kept telling people. Especially during recession periods, it is difficult for an administration to pull a 180 on the economy. Obama's Administration had a decent amount of success in this regard, especially given how badly we were circling the drain towards a global depression. In many ways, the Great Recession was going to turn into a depression even worse than the Great Depression had been. The globalization of our world would've taken every industrialized country down with the United States. That doesn't give many of these countries a way out, either through trade deficits or the production of cheaper products from areas of the economy that could still operate okay.

Trump had one of the best economies that any president has acquired over the last sixty years. JFK took office during a recession, Nixon took office during a recession, Ford took office in a deepening recession, Carter took office in a more mild recession, Reagan took office in a moderate recession (which Republicans never let anyone forget, mind you, even though it was a lot milder than the one Obama inherited in spite of the fact that he had much higher GDP growth that he inherited and the like), Bill Clinton took office with a recession, and George W. Bush took office with an impending recession due largely to the very same market forces that gave Clinton his strong record on the economy (he didn't really do much in that time to enhance or deter it--which is still smart economic decision-making...at least for that period). The only two presidents since FDR that have had a better inherited economy were Eisenhower and Bush I. This part of the reason everyone expected that Clinton would win this time.

And, yet, he still managed to muck it up. He wasn't smart enough, as Bill Clinton was, to let the markets do their thing while they were operating properly. Honestly, Obama might have benefited, at least with economic prosperity, by having to take his hands off the wheel a bit once the recovery had started. The markets were getting back to being able to operate the way they needed to. The time to do the kind of worker's protections that Obama wanted were going to be after the recovery had completed, around 2015. Otherwise he might've ended up undermining the positive progress he had made with the economy and setting it back on the right track. Just as much of economic decision-making is deciding when it is appropriate to take your hand off the wheel as much as when it is appropriate to get hands-on. Reagan was lucky that his policies of laissez-faire economics worked because the economy was actually just hitting a speed-bump. It just needed the right kinds of jolts.

None of the people I know who are old enough to have cared about money during the Carter years consider it a 'mild' recession. They all talk about stagflation and consider it the worst economy that they have lived through between then and today. And these are people who lived in an area that used to depend on a military base and the Canadian shopper and dealt with the base closing and the Canadian dollar dropping into a tailspin at the same time.

[TheInvisibleMan]

I guess a better question is the message of division and hate reaching more people than it did 10 years ago, or why is it reaching more people than the message of unity and love?

because hiding behind unity means not wanting to have difficult conversations about race, sex, gender

there is institutional and systemic racism and sexism (with white people, namely white men perpetrating this)

there is a "war on women", with various states trying to implement abortion restrictions while limiting access to birth control

unity and love isn't crap if you don't address the problems that are already there

[TheInvisibleMan]

What's for a lark mean?

Really? I see one about most people on food stamps are white. I see another that says white people are responsible for race relations and they are responsible to fix it. I see several calling out white privilege. I mean, these don't paint white people in a very positive light yet minorities aren't out there giving hell to white people the way white people are doing it to minorities. Right?

as a black man, we are used to white people crapping all over us

we endure

and now white people are finally being called on their long standing BS

sorry, not sorry if that bothers you

[Joker]

I'm late, so skip this if you don't care, but I want to address both of these.

You rock.
And Mets was being rude and ignorant with his post and if the shoe was on the other foot, I'd give him a 3 day ban.

Ignorant, maybe. Uninformed our out of touch, sure. I wouldn't ban Mets for speaking his mind, even if I think it was a dumb thing to say or a dumb way to say it. He won't talk and hopefully listen and maybe learn if you just ban him. He also didn't do anything to deserve a ban.

In both of my posts on the topic, I did consider the possibility that older generations have the same percentage of trans people, but they're not able to be openly trans.

I apologize, I completely missed that if you said it. I guess I got hung up on the part I thought was most worth addressing.

I disagree with the idea that it's wrong to look deeply into the results of a study.

It just seemed to me that you were looking at the wrong reason for the answers the study found.

How was it rude? And what specifically did I say that is so beyond the pale as to merit a ban?

I know this wasn't directed at me, but for what it's worth, again, I don't think it was rude, or deserving of a ban.

I do think it was ignorant or uninformed of how sexuality and/or gender identity works. That's not worth a ban, though.

[Carabas]

What's for a lark mean?

For fun. Okay, it's supposed to be "on a lark". My bad.

Really? I see one about most people on food stamps are white. I see another that says white people are responsible for race relations and they are responsible to fix it. I see several calling out white privilege. I mean, these don't paint white people in a very positive light yet minorities aren't out there giving hell to white people the way white people are doing it to minorities. Right?

See, none of that comes up when I throw "Huffpost white people" into Google.

Okay, I get some of that when I try Huffpost "white people". A lot of the results are just about some Netflix show called 'Dear White People'.

There also seems to be a massive problem with you equating saying something about a group of white people with blaming all white people, and apparently you don't know what privilege means. Not that that word even came up on google.